A neurologist who attracted public attention through his book Awakenings, which told of a group of people, patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in New York city in the mid-1960s, who “awakened” from decades-long inability to move after Sacks gave them Levodopa. When Sacks examined these patients, he discovered they had all contracted a form of encephalitis, commonly called sleepy sickness, that swept through North America and Europe in the 1920s. Because of his experience as a neurologist treating people with Parkinson’s disease, sacks believed these patients, too, were suffering from a form of Parkinson’s as a complication of the encephalitis.
The drug levodopa had just become available, and sacks administered it to these patients, who immediately responded, giving the impression of “awakening” from the immobility that had contained them. The experience prompted medical recognition of postencephalitic parkinsonism, which sacks wrote about in articles published in medical journals before publishing the book Awakenings in 1973. When in 1990, the book was made into a fictionalized account in the movie of the same title, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, it drew widespread public attention to Parkinson’s disease.
